Seize the moments

Mike Henneman was one of Shahid Khan’s friends giggling madly at the must-see mustaches. They have known each other for more than 40 years. They are co-owners of a bio-diesel plant and were fraternity brothers at Beta Theta Pi.

“He and I talk and laugh and say, ‘If we could ever turn the clock back, that would be one of the times we would turn it back to.’ It was a lot of fun,” Henneman said.

Joining the fraternity was a conscious effort by Khan to immerse himself in American culture, and it was one of many times in his life where a fear-no-failure attitude would serve him well.

“He was very much like everybody else,” Henneman says. “I know that’s crazy to say because he came from Pakistan. He really blended in, participated, was active. I will tell you, what’s interesting in my mind about it, you would think that in a lot of situations people would be more reserved and shy and want to be with other people from Pakistan. In this particular case, he actually forced himself to be the opposite.”

Khan’s college life was like anybody else’s. He juggled summer jobs. He studied. He longed for a fast car, and after he bought a fast one, he longed for one even faster. He also attended Illinois football games. The first one baffled him. But he soon fell in love with the sport.

And with a girl.

There was a bar near the University of Illinois campus called Wit’s End. One day Khan noticed a pretty blonde playing pinball. They had mutual friends but had not met. He did not wait for those friends to introduce him to her.

“You’re waiting for an introduction, you’re doomed,” he said.

Those seven words sum up his go-get-it approach to life. He and the girl playing pinball—she’s now Ann Carlson Khan—are married and have two grown children—Tony, a bio-diesel executive who is working in analytics for the Jaguars, and Shanna, who works as a district aide for a congressman.

In the summer of 1970, right before his 20th birthday, Shad Khan went “door to door,” looking for a job. One morning, he got one. A woman offered to make him the manager of a sit-down ice cream restaurant. He took it. Later that day, an engineering company offered him a job.

Two jobs, one day. He debated the merits of both. The ice cream job meant he’d wear a tie in an air-conditioned building. Not a bad gig considering just a few years earlier he had gotten his start as a dishwasher. Now he’d get to tell high schoolers to wash the dishes. He’d seem totally cool as he pulled up in the Alfa Romeo he bought himself for his 19th birthday. Plus, working at an ice cream place means access to ice cream. Fast car plus pretty girl plus ice cream equals greatest summer ever.

With the engineering job, he’d still have the car and the girl, but he’d also be hot and dirty and exposed to welders’ torches; it was essentially a blacksmith’s shop. The place was, in his words, “a hole in the wall.” Plus, no ice cream. But he came to the United States to become an engineer, so he called the lady at the ice cream shop back and said he had changed his mind.

“Whenever I’ve gotten to a fork in the road, the hard way, for me, has almost always been the right way,” he said.

That tough decision is how Khan started working at Flex-N-Gate, which he eventually bought and built into a multinational corporation that employs 14,000 people in 48 manufacturing plants and nine product development and engineering facilities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Spain. He doesn’t have any formal business training, but as his son says, he has a Ph.D. worth of practical experience.

“There is a phrase that if you build a better mousetrap the world is going to beat a path to your door. You’ve probably heard that,” he says. “Absolutely wrong. That’s not how life works. You’ve got to build a better mousetrap. Then you’ve got to go sell it. You’ve got to be paranoid enough to keep improving that mousetrap.”

Khan’s better mousetrap was a seamless bumper for pickup trucks. When he tried to sell it to the Big Three automakers in Detroit, he got nowhere. He turned his attention to foreign automakers. Toyota and others were shipping their pickups to the United States—to Jacksonville, Fla.—without bumpers. Khan convinced Toyota to buy his bumpers.

Of course it was not easy. There were numerous trips to Japan, Los Angeles and Hawaii to woo Toyota, big deals won and lost, a dispute with the IRS, the change in bumpers from steel to plastic, the recession, the ever-changing landscape of the auto industry. To hear Khan and his family and friends tell it, overcoming the obstacles and learning from the failures are what make him successful. “There’s no downside to failing,” he says. “That’s a very, very American concept. As a matter of fact, failure can almost become a merit badge for the next opportunity.”

For proof of that, look to how he became an NFL owner.

All signs pointed to Jacksonville

About five years ago, Khan began to investigate buying an NFL team. He called an executive at the NFL and started asking questions. “They used to say in college, ‘You’ve got to ask the best-looking girls out, because you’d be amazed how often they don’t get asked.’ That analogy, I think, it applies in life,” Khan says. “If you don’t pop the questions, you never find out.”

His timing was good, if not also lucky. The NFL had recently started trying to be proactive in helping potential buyers, which Khan did not know until he called. A man looking for help found a man looking for men to help. “We don’t advertise this, but we just quietly let it be known that if people were interested in being owners, we would like to get to know them in advance,” says Eric Grubman, executive vice president of the NFL.

In the six or seven years it has sought to help buyers, the NFL has talked to dozens of people. Some learn they can’t afford it. Some want to be limited partners. Some want to own teams outright.

Grubman served as a mentor to Khan; he suggested Khan introduce himself to other owners, which Khan did. One of the owners he talked to was Jerry Jones of the Cowboys. Jones knew of Khan’s business success but didn’t know much about his background. “Make no mistake about it, I knew I was talking to the real deal,” Jones says.

After a brief phone conversation, they met face to face roughly three years ago. Jones was impressed with Khan’s commitment to being involved with the team. “I have such respect for him and what he’s accomplished and how he’s accomplished it, his style,” Jones says. “As a personality, he’s very charming. He’s also very persuasive with his personality. He’s got a very easy way about him, he’s easy to talk to, easy to approach, easy to be around, which is a big plus. As it turns out, we end up spending quite a bit of time each other with the business of the NFL today.”

Initially, Khan decided he was not ready to buy a team. But a few years later, he was. In February 2010, Khan had a deal to become part owner of the Rams. But at the last minute, Stan Kroenke, who already owned 40 percent of the team, exercised his right to match Khan’s offer and become full owner.

Khan was disappointed but not overly so. He knew going in that Kroenke had that option. He had formed many good relationships and learned how teams operate. And truth be told, he was not big on being a partner. His much bigger preference was to be a sole owner.

Less than two years after the Rams deal fell apart, Khan got another chance with the Jaguars. Wayne Weaver was one of the owners Khan had gotten to know when he first started poking around about buying a team. When Weaver was looking to sell, he had a buyer that he, the NFL and many fellow NFL owners already knew. In that insular world, that’s a big deal.

Just as Khan’s first attempts to sell to the Big Three failed, so did his first attempt to buy an NFL team. Just as Jacksonville was the key to success for Flex-N-Gate, so it was the key for his success in the NFL. He calls this coincidence a coincidence and then smiles. “It’s kismet,” he says, a Turkish word that means fate or destiny. He smiles as he says it because that’s also the name his wife gave to their 220-foot yacht that is docked in Jacksonville.